As a teacher and lifelong learner, I absolutely love podcasts. You can find limitless inspiration and terrific resources via the talks, videos, and conversations broadcast with teachers in mind. Rita Pierson’s Talk is one of my favorites and something I believe every teacher should watch. I subscribe to a bunch of really good ones including the ones at Teacher Cast and NPR Education and Ted Talks Education.

I think one of the problems is that they are often listening on their phones while simultaneously being bombarded by texts,notifications, phone calls and who knows what else. We try to circumvent distraction by giving our students listening guides and viewing guides so they have a purpose. Learning to watch and listen with a purpose is a vital academic and life skill, and one sometimes I fear we are losing as we become more and more screen driven. This year we will be using VideoNot.es when our kids are assigned videos to watch like episodes of Eyes on the Prize during our Civil Rights Unit. VideoNot.es is an incredible tool that allows you to take real time notes on videos from Youtube, Vimeo, Udacity, and Khan Academy that are automatically synchronized with the video and saved directly into your google drive. Here is a terrific tutorial on how to use Videonot.es
Again as with everything on the web the resources and available material is overwhelming. In addition to the links above here are a few other great indexes and resources if you are looking for great podcasts:

For great resources from the New York Times including podcasts visit the education blog.

I am currently taking an online class offered by k12learning20 based on the 23 things program to introduce teachers to different Web 2.0 resources. Although I am already fairly fluent in many of these tools, I am very much looking forward to expanding my skill base. Our Thing 3 assignment requires us to complete a blog post on the meaning of teaching in a Web 2.0 world which is fortuitous because the questions presented have been bouncing around in my brain for a while now. This post is just the first part of what I am thinking of as a series examining my experience teaching in a web 2.0 world and the continuing relevance of the traditional tools of teachers.

First of all, I believe in technology and I believe that every teacher has not only the opportunity, but more the obligation to become fluent in the latest tools of the trade. My teaching has improved as a result of the resources and ideas I have gotten from twitter chats, my experience at edcamprva, and other professional development opportunities. Our American Studies class is very techie, and so is pretty much every class I teach. We use a variety of web 2.0 tools and our students have benefited from our increased knowledge.

All that said, I have to say that I think we are overestimating the impact of web 2.0 tools. Sure they are great and readily available, many for free even, but a good tool will never replace a good teacher and too much of the language bouncing around the educational world seems to suggest otherwise. I also worry about how quickly the standby tools of the trade i.e. lecture or even the idea of the teacher as the expert are so quickly dismissed as 20th or 19th century ideas that are some how no longer relevant in today’s 21st century world. I disagree. I think that every teacher has a toolbox of things they do well some are cutting edge and some are older than any of us. The goal of education especially in the humanities classroom is to teach students to think critically, develop a level of cultural literacy, and frankly be able to retell the stories/histories that make up our curriculum and give each story their own slant. Web 2.0 tools definitely can help with that process, but so can great lectures, in depth reading, and other tools that have been around centuries. Furthermore, I refuse to believe that we live in a world where knowledge no longer matters.

I also believe that we have an obligation to our students to be fluent in their world and their world is certainly increasingly a web 2.0 world full of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr to just name a few. We, as teachers and really as people sharing the world with the generation of digital natives, should also understand and be able to participate in this world.

So what is the meaning of web 2.0 in the world of education? My answer: The tools available to us in the Web 2.0 world are what we make of them. It is a world we need to own and share with our students, but not rely on to the exclusivity of all the other tools in the box. I’ll be writing on much of this in more detail in the coming weeks.

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Three years ago after a long and deliberate process, our school adopted an American Studies to replace our traditional US History and American Literature curriculum. The inspiration for this course which currently serves 2/3 of our junior class came both from my and my co-teacher’s American Studies backgrounds and our frustration with the apparent and unnecessary disconnect between our US History and American Literature courses. Oftentimes, students would be studying Antebellum America while reading The Great Gatsby, and students weren’t given the opportunity to see the inherent connections between the historical period of a text and the text itself. Furthermore, they seemed to see the skills they learned about close reading and critical thinking in each class as distinct and separate and only applicable to each specific discipline. In rethinking how we could best serve our students, we wanted more than just a chronological alignment of the curriculum. We wanted to give them both the tools and resources to be able to see and understand a fuller picture of how history and culture inform and are informed by each other. Furthermore, we wanted them to see that the tools of textual analysis and critical thinking apply to all kinds of texts, and we wanted to be able to serve all of our students, both high end and struggling learners better in a heterogeneous and team-taught class.

The course we came up with integrates a variety of web 2.0 platforms, many types of texts (including readings, images, films, and songs), and different modes of learning that enable us to differentiate and meet the needs of a diverse student body. A sample lesson might include reading Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration“To My Dear and Loving Husband” and “On the Burning of Our House” by Anne Bradstreet while examining documents from Digital History to see points of connection and disconnection between Puritan ideals and real, lived experience. We use both traditional and 21st century types of assessments. Students blog, write lengthy research papers on a topic of their choice related to American History, create websites about artifacts from the University of Virginia’s Special Collections, present on supreme court cases, and regularly participate in seminar discussions to name just a few of our modes of assessment. Right now, we are currently reading Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (see lesson plan for the opening day) and studying the Great Depression using many different kinds of images including WPA posters and photographs. Our students each analyzed contribution of the WPA for homework last night. Some of which can be found at our class blog.

The course continues to evolve and we continue to refine it, but we have been pleased with the success of our students of all levels. We have been able to prepare a significant number of our students to earn college credit worthy scores on the APUSH exam while at the same time helping students who had previously struggled in our former discipline specific curriculum really thrive. I could write pages and pages, and I will. Consider this post just a brief introduction to our program.

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Listed below in absolutely no order of preference are web tools and applications we’ve used successfully in our class room this year.

1. Socrative– I’m pretty new to using this tool, but it has been a great addition. We’ve used it to get feedback from students about what they’ve learned from readings, lectures, and films. It has also helped us to make the connections between the different lessons we teach during our double period class clearer to our students. The ability to give auto-graded quizzes which output into a spread sheet is a definite bonus. Students can use their phones, tablets or computers which is nice in a class where not everyone has a laptop.

2. WordPress– We created a class blog this year stabamstud.com. Students have posted information on their research paper sources, shared responses to the 2012 election, and we have also used it to share information with them. We will probably use it more next year when we plan to have students blog about all of their sources instead of handing in an annotated bibliography.

3. Livebinder– This site which allows you to create online binders to store and share material has been a godsend for us. Since I teach with a team, we have used this to share resources with each other and have shared binders with students. Here is a binder we created for our opening unit:http://www.livebinders.com/play/play/453144

4. Google Aps– As you can see from my post about using google docs to give students feedback about thier writing, we really value this platform. It makes it easy for our team to collaborate when making tests, creating lesson plans, and writing assignments. We have also used google forms to create surveys for our class and to get feedback via anonymous course evaluations.

5. Learnist– This resource was one of the best discoveries I’ve made recently on twitter. It is much like Pinterest, but easier to navigate and with an audience that seems to involve mainly educators. It is so easy to make boards and there are already great resources on the site. It is incredibly easy and user friendly. Here is one board I made for our upcoming unit on the Great Depression and this one on tech tools we use.

7. Prezi– Although I have to say I have not yet mastered the art of making great Prezi’s, this is a fantastic tool and one of my teammates is incredibly proficient. We have used Prezi for many different presentations and it is incredibly useful. I particularly like the ability to imbed all different kinds of media. There are also some great ready made prezis available through the search function. Here is one I am working on right now for the day we go back to school. I will be talking with the kids about the historical forces that set the stage for the Harlem Renaissance and some of the key artists/intellectuals involved. Here is one that I used when talking with students about First Wave Feminism

8. Mural.ly– This is another recent discovery. A bit like Prezi, I find it slightly easier to navigate. Like Prezi, it enables you to embed a variety of different types of media. Here is one we just started working on for the same unit on the 1930’s.

9. Dropbox– A great way to share and save documents. We also used shared folders to transfer material from one teacher to another.

10. Itunes U- We have used a variety of the resources both as ways to deliver content to our students either in class or for homework. We have also used some of the courses especially Berkley Professor Michael Cohen’s American Studies Course.

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Google docs has transformed the writing instruction of the classes I teach. Prior to our school’s adoption of Google Aps, I gave significant feedback on the margins of student papers. I also used the comment boxes in Pages or MSWord when my students began to hand in their papers electronically via email. I liked the freedom that the infinite space of the comment box gave me. This space enabled me to rework students sentences and to specifically and directly target individual words and sentences. It did take a bit longer as I found myself giving more feedback, but ultimately I liked the improvements I saw in my students writing as a result of the increase in comments I was able to give them.

Two years ago, when I began using google docs to comment and grade my papers, I thought that it would be similar to the use of a word processing program. I thought the main benefit would be that I wouldn’t have to email my students their corrected papers. Yet, I vastly underestimated the benefit of using google docs. I can say without a doubt that because of google docs our students receive better and more thorough writing instruction, and they are becoming stronger writers because of it.
Our American Studies students, I say we because I team teach, write 10-12 page research papers during the second trimester. Students submit focused thesis paragraphs, very thorough outlines, first drafts and final drafts. For the most part( I do not require it because all of my students don’t have internet access at home), students use google docs to submit each part of their papers and I use the comment feature to give them feedback. This lengthy process has been made much richer because of the amount, quality, and responsiveness of the feedback students received on all parts of the process.

Here are some of the benefits:
Realtime Feedback: The ability to give students real time feedback on their writing is what I love most. Often times we can either sit together looking at the same screen or I can get online with them, comment and give them instant feedback as they rework their writing.

The Comment Box: The unlimited room of the comment box and the ability to tag individual words or complete sentences makes it clear to the student exactly what part of their writing you are talking about and gives you the opportunity to give them examples of ways to improve or enhance their papers.

Accountability: Students, once they share their documents, enable you to see exactly where they are with the writing process. This is especially important when they are undertaking major assignments like research papers.

Convenience: The google doc is convenient in all of the obvious ways, but the ability for students to “resolve” your comments makes their editing easier and more focused.

Nothing in the world of teaching is without its challenges. Here are a few I’ve found:

TIME: You can and do spend more time with each individual paper. Although I do think that the benefit of seeing multiple drafts means that the final draft requires much less reworking.

Organization: Difficulty keeping the documents organized. I do have folders, and I use them. Yet I still haven’t found a great method of organizing my documents yet and that makes finding documents challenging sometimes. Yes the search feature works, but keeping the titles of all of my students’ work straight is difficult. Yes I am sure there are ways to do this, but I haven’t yet developed a good system yet. (Suggestions welcome!)